Widdershins (35 page)

“So, can we go back home now?” Lizzie asks.

“I don’t know the way,” I tell her.

We both look at the doonie, but he shakes his head.

“This world is closed inside and out,” he says. “Nobody can get in or out without permission.”

“Well, I give you permission,” I say.

That gets us another shake of his head. “It seems more complicated than that.”

“Are you saying, we’re stuck here?” Lizzie asks.

“So it would seem.”

“Well, at least there aren’t any bogans.” She looks to me. “You said there weren’t any, right?”

“I think there’s something worse,” I tell her.

They both look at me, waiting for me to explain.

“It’s a complicated story,” I say. “And not a very happy one.”

“We don’t have anywhere else to go,” Lizzie says.

I give the house a look, but there still doesn’t seem to be anybody stirring there.

“Has that place got something to do with this?” Lizzie asks.

“It’s where it all started,” I tell her.

Then we all sit down in the grass under the tree and that old oak of mine gets to hear my story all over again.

Rabedy Collins

The mists had drawn back a little
when Rabedy arrived on the seashore with Odawa at his side, but otherwise the beach was much the same. A grey and dismal place that smelled of fish and algae. The doonie’s hoof prints still began abruptly and ended as they had before, although this time there was the addition of the tracks that Rabedy and the others had left. In time, no trace of them would remain, for the tide was coming in and already washing onto the prints, softening their edges.

“Take me to where their trail ends,” the green-bree said.

He put a hand on Rabedy’s shoulder, as he had when they crossed over from the Aisling’s Wood. Rabedy shivered, disliking the touch as much now as he had before. And why was it that Odawa hadn’t needed this sort of help before?

“Are you really blind?” Rabedy asked.

“Yes. But I’m old and my medicine is potent. It allows me to compensate. While I can’t physically see as you do, and I can’t sense details, I can usually get by.”

“Medicine . . . that’s what we call magic.”

“It is and it isn’t. There are parts of it that reside in ourselves, that come with our blood, but mostly it’s power we borrow from the spirits.”

“This is where the trail ends,” Rabedy said.

Odawa let go of the bogan’s shoulder and moved his hands back and forth in the air, feeling for the doonie’s trail.

“What do you sense here?” he asked Rabedy.

The blind gaze turned to look at the bogan, finding his face with no trouble.

Rabedy closed his eyes, as much to not have to look into those milky eyes as to concentrate.

“Access to anywhere,” he said. “A thousand roads.”

“And the doonie? Where did he go?”

Rabedy concentrated again.

“He’s just gone,” he said, surprised.

Normally a passage between the worlds left some residue, some hint of where one’s quarry had gone. But here, there was nothing.

“I get the same,” Odawa said. “They’ve vanished into a hidden world, and there’ll be no following them now.”

Rabedy waited a moment, then asked, “Does it really matter that much?”

“Who’s the blind one here?”

Rabedy shrugged, then realized the green-bree couldn’t see the gesture.

“I understand vengeance,” he said, “but unlike some of my kind, I don’t understand cruelty.”

“You think me cruel?”

“What would you call what you do?”

“He blinded me.”

“When he thought you were already dead. And then you killed his wife, and others close to him, too, if all the tales are true. You should have taken your battle directly to him. That would have been the honourable course.”

Odawa gave a slow nod. “And probably the wiser, too. She cursed me before she died. She cursed me to wander forever, but never reach my destination.”

“So that’s why you needed our help. If you were to hunt him directly, you would never get near to him.”

“That was my thought, to use you as a bridge to reaching the damned jay. But it seems that the curse holds true even when I use intermediaries, for I’m no closer to Grey now than I’ve ever been.”

Rabedy looked down the long grey sands of the beach to where it disappeared into the mist. He sighed.

“I can take you to him,” he said.

“And yet you thought me cruel.”

“Hurting the people around him—that’s cruel. Finishing your business with Grey . . . that’s just between the two of you.”

“And for a reward,” Odawa asked. “What do you require?”

Rabedy spat on the sand between them. “I don’t want anything. I just want this done so that we can go back to doing what bogans do, and you can go back to whatever it is that you are.”

The blind gaze never left Rabedy’s face.

“Big Dan wanted safe passage through the green and the wild,” Odawa said. “For him and anyone in his company.”

“I’m not my uncle.”

“Then perhaps I could show you how to complete your shapeshifting one way or the other so that you don’t have to walk around the way you do, caught between dog and bogan.”

He started to reach for Rabedy, but the bogan backed out of his reach.

“I told you,” he said. “I don’t want anything, and I don’t want to be beholden. I’ll figure this out on my own.”

“I meant it to be knowledge, freely given.”

“Do you want Grey or don’t you?” Rabedy asked.

The brow above the green-bree’s milky eyes wrinkled into a frown, but then he forced himself to smile.

“I want him,” he said.

“Fine. Then let’s finish this.”

Rabedy stepped closer, but paused just out of reach before the blind green-bree could put his hand back on the bogan’s shoulder.

“Remember,” Rabedy said. “I have your name.”

Odawa moved so quickly, Rabedy never saw him coming. One moment the green-bree was standing in front of him, the next Odawa had him in a headlock, arm around his neck so that neither air nor words could escape his throat.

“Don’t threaten me, boy,” he said in Rabedy’s ear, his voice conversational and soft, which felt all the more deadly. “You need to get that name out into the air for it to be of any use and I am not entirely infirm.”

Rabedy fought the grip, but to no avail. The green-bree held him long enough to show that, had he wanted, he could have caused some real pain—could have snapped Rabedy’s neck, could have held him until he choked—then he let go and gave the bogan a push away from him. Rabedy staggered on the sand and only just caught himself from falling. He turned, glaring, a name forming on his lips.

“I could have killed you, boy,” Odawa said before Rabedy could get the name out. “I could have snapped your neck like a twig. But I didn’t. Will you now kill an unarmed, blind man?”

Rabedy lifted a hand to rub at his throat. He wanted to speak the name Big Dan had given him. Wanted to drive the pluiking green-bree’s face into the beach and choke him on the wet sand. And he wasn’t fooled by the mild tone of Odawa’s voice. He was wary now, and if the truth be known, more than a little nervous. How could a blind man move that fast?

Odawa’s milky-white gaze remained fixed on him, waiting for a reply.

“I’m not a boy,” was all he could find to say.

“No, you’re somewhere between a bogan and a dog. Hold,” the greenbree added, lifting his hand when Rabedy was about to speak. “I know what you meant and I’ll offer you this promise: I’ll mind my manners and call you by the speaking name you’ve given me. Can I expect the same consideration in return?”

“Or what?”

Odawa sighed. “Or nothing. Or you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. Or you’ll speak my true name and my will becomes yours. Why must everything be a confrontation with you people?”

Rabedy could only look at the green-bree. His neck was sore. He remembered the ease with which Odawa had put him out of action.

“After what you just did to me,” he said, “you still expect me to help you?”

“I expect nothing. I am only asking. The decision is entirely yours.”

“And if I help you, you’ll go away and leave us all alone?”

“I’ll leave you alone even if you don’t help me,” the green-bree said. “Haven’t you been listening? I offer you no threat. I need help and I’ll be grateful to you if you provide it, but I am not here to force my will on anyone.”

“Except for Grey.”

Odawa shook his head. “No, not even him. I just mean to kill Grey. I’m done with games and threats and all the childish nonsense that has filled my life for too many years. It’s time I simply dealt with Grey and got on with my life.”

“Corbae don’t die easily,” Rabedy said.

The doubt was plain in his voice. True, Odawa had dealt effortlessly with him, but he was only a poor excuse for a bogan, as his uncle liked to say. Grey . . . Grey was a corbae in his prime. In his veins ran the same blood as that cousin of his who had brought the world into being in the long ago.

“No,” Odawa agreed. “Especially not when he’s aided by the curse of his dead wife that keeps misdirecting me whenever I try to get near him. But I guarantee you this, Master Rabedy. Put him in front of me, and you’ll see how easily a corbae can die.”

Rabedy gave a slow nod. And then the world could go back to the way it had been before Big Dan brought the blind green-bree into their lives. Odawa would go away. Grey would be dead, and they wouldn’t have to worry about his coming after them for the killing of his cerva cousin. Fairy and the spirits of the wild and the green could go back to ignoring one another, and life would be so much less complicated than it had become.

“I’ll bring you to him,” he said. “But then you’ll be on your own. I won’t add to the troubles between our people.”

“All I ask,” Odawa assured him, “is for the chance to stand face to face with the man who blinded me. Give me that and I won’t need your help or that of anyone else.”

“Fair enough,” Rabedy said.

He took a piece of string out of his pocket and knotted it once, twice, and then a third time.

“Here,” he said, putting the knotted string into the green-bree’s hand. “Think of Grey as you undo one of these knots, and it should guide you to him.”

Odawa fingered the string. “There are three knots.”

“So you’ll get three tries. I can’t fit more onto that bit of string. But surely that should be enough.”

“Depending on how well they work against his wife’s curse.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“I could still use your eyes until I find him.”

Rabedy sighed. He wanted to be done with this
now.
But if he was to get rid of the green-bree once and for all . . .

“Fine,” he said. “So let’s go and get it done.”

He stepped closer to Odawa and allowed the green-bree to grip his shoulder. When those strong fingers found their hold, Rabedy led them away from the dismal grey shoreline of this unhappy world that was Odawa’s
croi baile.

Geordie

I wondered what Eddie would think
to see the bunch of us go trooping off into the woods behind his hotel, but we didn’t run into him on the way out, so I was spared the need to come up with some plausible excuse. That also meant that I didn’t have to introduce him to Cassie and explain what she was doing all the way out in Sweetwater without a car or a ride to get here. I liked Eddie and didn’t particularly feel like lying to him, but telling him that we were off to call up a stag spirit, or that Cassie had gotten here by crow girl express would only make things way more complicated than they already were.

We tramped through the bush, avoiding the clumps of hard, icy snow that had yet to get the message that spring was here, until we found a small meadow that was out of sight of the hotel or any of the other buildings in Sweetwater. On any other day I’d have been happy to hang out and play some tunes under one of the beeches or elms that rose up above the cedars and scrub trees. But although the weather was warm enough, and I did have my fiddle with me, the case hanging from my shoulder by a strap, we were here on more serious business.

“So, who’s going to do it?” Siobhan asked.